7.3.4 HTTP Headers

In addition to defining the infrastructure to parse headers, the (web http) module defines specific parsers and unparsers for all headers defined in the HTTP/1.1 standard.

For example, if you receive a header named ‘Accept-Language’ with a value ‘en, es;q=0.8’, Guile parses it as a quality list (defined below):

(parse-header 'accept-language "en, es;q=0.8")
⇒ ((1000 . "en") (800 . "es"))

The format of the value for ‘Accept-Language’ headers is defined below, along with all other headers defined in the HTTP standard. (If the header were unknown, the value would have been returned as a string.)

For brevity, the header definitions below are given in the form, Type name, indicating that values for the header name will be of the given Type. Since Guile internally treats header names in lower case, in this document we give types title-cased names. A short description of the each header’s purpose and an example follow.

For full details on the meanings of all of these headers, see the HTTP 1.1 standard, RFC 2616.

This document was generated on April 20, 2013 using texi2html 5.0.